


Burdens

by iggytropester (tropester)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Past Abuse, Protectiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24722365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tropester/pseuds/iggytropester
Summary: After seven years, Ignis has made peace with what happened to him when they were younger. He wishes he could say the same for Gladio.
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 1
Kudos: 55





	Burdens

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Bestie for the read-through.

Ignis watches, bemused, as Prompto takes in the sight of the quiet bar from where he’s stationed himself nearby. He’s not doing it intentionally, Ignis thinks, the way he’s mimicking Gladio’s stance when they’re at a pub—elbow on the counter, leaning over it, encroaching enough of the next seat that no one will think to take it, but far enough into Ignis’s space that it is obvious they are acquainted. 

Though unlike Gladio, Prompto is relaxed, blithely smiling at the view and occasionally checking his phone.

He suffers a few more minutes of this before he gently says Prompto’s name and asks, "Did you need something?"

"Hm?" is the distracted response. Ignis waits patiently until the trademark blank look slowly morphs into puzzlement, and then uncertainty. All directed inwards, as if he doesn’t quite know why he’s doing what he’s doing. He looks at Ignis, looks at the bar top, looks at the bartender. "No, uh...just thought I’d...hang out..."

Ignis represses a sigh. Prompto isn’t stupid, regardless of how often Noctis teases him with it. It’s simply that his capacity to observe and to trust outweigh everything else he does.

So when, throughout the length of their journey, he sees—without fail—Gladio hovering pointedly close to Ignis whenever he drinks at the bar, he seems to have filed it away as "a thing you do by default." Like handing Gladio an electrolyte-boosted drink after a workout, or charging Noctis’s phone alongside his own after they play King’s Knight. "Bar" has become adjacent to "Ignis is not to be left alone."

He lets some kindness show through his polite smile when he sees Prompto eventually arrive at the same conclusion. "You’ve been absorbing too many of Gladio’s bad habits," he remarks, before taking a sip of his gin. 

"Sorry," Prompto says, scratching the back of his neck. "Did you want me to leave, or…?"

"I’ve no issue with your company."

He looks incredibly unhappy with that answer. "Right. Um...that’s not a ‘yes’." 

Ignis chuckles. "And it’s not a ‘no’. Do what you will."

His eyes narrow when he catches the worried glance thrown at the stairs, the nervous way Prompto wipes his hand on his shirt and the little shuffling of feet he does as he adjusts how he’s leaning on the bar. The brief look he gives Ignis freezes him for a moment. He meekly stops fidgeting, but doesn’t move from his spot.

Unwilling to leave, in case this thing that he’s doing without knowing why could be important. Perhaps safety-related, perhaps friendship-related. "Just part of being a good bro", as he is so fond of saying.

 _It is rather sweet._ Ignis takes another sip and listens as Prompto mutters another "sorry". He likely would have been annoyed if he isn’t so used to it. 

He’s also used to Prompto’s curiosity, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when the next thing he does, bold as one can be, is ask, "But now that you mention it—"

"I didn’t."

"—why _does_ the big guy...you know..."

He trails off, looking a bit lost and in in dire need of an explanation.

Ignis wonders if he owes him that, given the rather touching nature of Prompto’s actions. He decides he doesn’t. But he sighs and says anyway, after a long sip from his glass, "Something quite...terrible happened when we were younger. Sixteen. Well, Gladio was sixteen, I was fifteen. He has some misplaced guilt about the whole thing." 

"Oh…" Prompto says, and from that alone, Ignis knows he hasn’t said enough, "must have been bad..."

How much to say, he ponders. Just enough to keep this young man from running to Gladio with his curiosity, he supposes, because that would be the worst possible outcome from this. "We had—rather illegally—attended a Glaive’s end-of-year celebration at The Dancing Behemoth. As misfortune would have it, there was a group of men there who were anticipating the event and had plans to drug and remove Crowe Altius to have some illegal fun of their own." He pauses, watching his friend’s expression turn horrified and disgusted. Prompto remains incredibly fond of Crowe, his first older woman crush, he often says ("Brains, _and_ crazy mad skills!" followed with a wistful sigh). 

Ignis looks down at his drink as he finishes the story, "She had fallen ill that afternoon and begged off from the celebration. They had decided I would do just as well in her place instead."

He’s ready with the thin-lipped smile and the gesture to wave away Prompto’s heartfelt "Aw...no way...oh, shit, Iggy…" when it comes. Time has dulled the pain of that night, but the experience of retelling it becomes part of the narrative. He hasn’t much occasion to, over the years. Once, for Nyx, who’d been horrified that minors had been hurt during a Glaive event that he’d been in—end-of-year meant the Kingsglaives shipped out the very next morning, and news about the assault hadn’t reached their ears until they all returned in three months’ time. And again later, to his uncle, who’d come home from his ambassadorial duties unhappy to hear about the incident from second-hand sources. 

"It was a long time ago." His attempt to console does little to smooth out the worry from Prompto’s face. He considers a moment, then says, "Gladio dragged me to that party and at one point left me alone for two minutes. He thinks these two things make him worthy of blame." He raises an eyebrow, curious, despite himself, on how Prompto will reply. "Do you agree?"

"No!" Prompto says, his words vehement and vibrating with righteous indignation, "Of course not. That’s messed up."

"Mm." An idle thought is thrown to the man likely still snoozing upstairs. _Prompto gets it, so why don’t you?_ "He’s a large man, maybe it takes time for that realization to permeate his brain."

The joke falls flat because the unkind words make his friend nervous. Knocks against Gladio’s intelligence is often Noctis’s domain, playful, harmless banter, with Ignis more likely than not ready to defend Gladio’s more cerebral pursuits afterwards. 

In this, though...Ignis is disinclined to be kind.

"But, like…it’s been seven years…" Prompto says in a slow whisper.

"Indeed."

Prompto issues a slow exhale, followed by the awed "whoa" at just how much his mind has been blown.

Despite the story (or, perhaps, because of it), he still seems reluctant to leave him alone. After thirty minutes of the younger man pretending that the silence between them isn’t awkward and trying to be busy with his phone, Ignis takes pity and sends him out on an errand he’d hoped to accomplish that morning, buying a small pack of spiced Lestallum delicacies that Noctis had been fond of when he was five. 

He’s still working through his second glass of gin when he feels the familiar heavy presence join him at the bar.

"Everything all right?" Gladio asks, his hair still dripping from a recent shower, body exuding warmth like a furnace. His sheer presence dwarfs Prompto’s efforts to imitate it just moments earlier, and it nearly makes Ignis smile.

"Here, as you can see," he says, still feeling the aftermaths of the burn from his latest swallow, his voice mocking and flippant, "still un-drugged and unharmed. Thanks, no doubt, to your inclination for unpaid work as a bodyguard—"

" _You know why I do this_."

The sharp hiss, the sheer, desperate viciousness of it, leaves behind a heavy silence between the two men. 

Ignis says nothing, careful to keep his expression blank, and Gladio deflates almost immediately. " _Fuck_ ," he exhales more than says, furiously rubbing a hand through his hair. "You’re not...it’s not you—"

Ignis watches, watches as those proud shoulders bend inwards in a pose he dislikes, watches as Gladio breathes out the remnants of an anger that has burned for seven years and has given no signs of dying.

He picks up Gladio’s right hand, uncurls it from its tight fist, and lays a gentle kiss on the back, over his knuckles. This, he _can_ do—calm the rage, snuff out the fire. A privilege only one other, Iris, shares.

"I wish," Ignis says, with a bit of the sadness he feels leaking into his voice, "I can take away your pain, the way you did mine."

"Fuck you," Gladio snarls, genuine anger there, but his hand remains compliant in Ignis’s own, even when he lays it on the bar top and laces their fingers together. "Didn’t take away shit."

 _Is the guilt all you remember?_ Ignis almost asks, but he doesn’t want to hear the answer, not really. For as terrible as that time had been, it is memories of how Gladio had been so mindful, so caring, so bloody _tender_ with him in the months after that he ends up cherishing. Guilt-driven, perhaps, but so sorely needed. Ignis had no one to turn to then. He could hardly foist his pain on a thirteen-year-old Noctis, and while he gets along with most of the adults around him, they are, all of them, more colleagues or superiors than anything else. 

He and Gladio hadn’t even been all that close at the time. It would have been easy, so very easy, to do the bare minimum and then leave Ignis be to deal with his trauma alone. Every other Crownsguard peer of theirs had done so, after all. And Ignis would have been fine, eventually.

But Gladio had stayed, had been the first and last thing Ignis saw in the hospital every day for a month, had lagged in his own classes and changed his plans, and whatever else he did that Ignis still doesn’t know about, just to care for him. 

Ignis felt like he’d moved mountains just to make him matter.

He orders a blended scotch for him, and though it is awkward, Gladio grabs it with his left hand. 

As he looks at their entwined fingers, Ignis wonders, not for the first time, if he should take issue with the blatant lack of trust on display, regardless of how much of it is self-flagellation on Gladio’s end. Can’t leave Iggy alone at the bar, or something bad might happen. Can’t trust him to enjoy a drink alone.

But he also knows, without giving it much thought, that Gladio’s trust in him is deep—to defend himself, to support the group, to protect the King. 

It is only in this that he stumbles. 

An irrational fear, something that he himself still has in moderate amounts. The oddest things can throw him back to that horrible moment. The cut of a stranger’s beard. A hunter’s insignia. A turn of phrase. Just a few weeks ago, the familiar scent of a cologne at a shop stall had him buying the entire case for the sheer pleasure of breaking each bottle against a cliff face later that day, when everyone else was asleep at camp. 

No, the lack of trust in this is small, in the larger scale of things, and one Ignis can easily overlook until Gladio can work through his own guilt. However long it takes.

 _So_ , he thinks, as Gladio downs the rest of the drink in one grimace-inducing swallow, _fewer glib replies, perhaps_.

"Everything is fine," he says and means it, waiting until those harsh, stormy eyes meet his own, search his face. He doesn’t know what Gladio finds there, but it softens the edge of his frown, loosens the clench of his jaw. "You’re here now, and it’s been quiet tonight."

He’s rewarded with a tight nod and a squeeze on his hand. 

-End

**Author's Note:**

> First humble offering to the fandom. I’m still in Chapter 9 of the game, and my friend’s forbidden me from reading fics for now, so apologies if I get a lot of stuff wrong. I fell for Ignis _hard_ , and just needed to get this out.


End file.
